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Monday, May 24, 2010

It's been raining off and on over the past week, and add it the other things we've been up to, and the grass in the front yard needs baled....er.....mowed. At last, this afternoon, I hopped on my little lawn tractor and clipped it down to bare earth - or something about 4" away.

Since my last experiment with haylige was molested by a hungry bovine who destroyed the bag it was in to get at what was inside, I decided it would be a good idea to "hide" this stuff. That way, miss Mabel will need to work at it in order to get at it.

There was one thing I used today that I never have had the chance to run since we got it. It's an old "lawn sweeper" that Deb's Uncle had when he died in 1994. He had a lawn care business in Independence, Missouri, and it was one of the things he had for his work.

I've not used it up until now because I never picked up the clippings! When I DID want to pick them up, the lawn we had was either too small, or I didn't have a lawn tractor to pull it.

It's nothing fancy - just a sweeper broom on the front that picks up the clippings and tosses them into a basket. It sure beats hand raking and allows me to dump all the clippings in one spot with a flip of a handle.

The BAD thing about it is, it takes multiple passes to get everything swept up! I still have to come behind it with a rake, but it isn't as much. I'm still experimenting with how I mow to keep the clippings in small enough "windrows" so the sweeper can pick them up.

The sweeper also has lost the "thread" out of one stitch along the side and bottom. I'll need to figure out how to fix that before I used it again. At least I know it DOES work, just not as good as I had hoped!